The Indiscreet Moral Defects of the Bourgeoisie

Thanksgiving dinner is being served nightly at Playwrights Horizons, where a new comedy by Bruce Norris, “The Pain and the Itch,” opened yesterday. The menu is traditional, after a fashion.

During cocktails, crudités are on offer, accompanied by onion dip and assorted ill-disguised insults. The main course is turkey, basted in bile and stuffed with chestnuts, onions and long-held grievances. Side dishes include braised Brussels sprouts sprinkled with shaved almonds and hypocrisy, and cranberry sauce spiced with orange zest, racism and recrimination. Dessert is pumpkin pie of course, accompanied by lengthy discussions of pornography and disturbing hints of pedophilia.

Anyone for seconds?

Mr. Norris’s often funny but tough-to-stomach social satire is set in a handsomely appointed apartment in an unnamed city, cannily furnished by the designer, Dan Ostling, in the latest from the many home-décor catalogs clogging your mailbox. But it might as well be performed on a firing range, so relentlessly does Mr. Norris strafe his not-so-innocent victims, using their own words and actions for artillery.

The moving targets are an apparently contented young couple, Clay (Christopher Evan Welch) and Kelly (Mia Barron), of a self-righteously liberal bent, and their nearest and not so dearest: Clay’s brother, Cash (Reg Rogers), a doctor whose favored anesthetic is the martini; his friendly but vulgar Russian girlfriend, Kalina (Aya Cash); and the brothers’ sweetly condescending mother, Carol (Jayne Houdyshell).

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Ada-Marie L. Gutierrez, left, and Jayne Houdyshell in "The Pain and the Itch."Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

With the exception of Kalina, who survived a brutal childhood in Russia and has some trouble with English, everyone is smart, well-spoken and well educated, nicely dressed and superficially successful, although Clay has opted out of the rat race to be a stay-at-home dad. They are people just like a lot of people you might know, and Mr. Norris’s contention is that they are also monsters of hypocrisy, bad faith and self-interest.

The play takes place in two separate time frames, at two gatherings spliced together for dramatic effect. One is that holiday dinner, during which it is revealed that Clay and Kelly’s coddled toddler daughter, Kayla (played alternately by Ada-Marie L. Gutierrez and Vivien Kells), is suffering from an uncomfortable genital rash of unknown and possibly sinister cause. This discovery will lead, through a chain of anxiety and coincidence, to the second gathering, at which the family tries to explain to a taxi driver, Mr. Hadid (Peter Jay Fernandez), just how the disturbing news of Kayla’s affliction led to the tragedy that has upended his life.

With Mr. Hadid, the family members are on their best behavior, although their earnest tone is as patronizing as their ultimate purpose is mercenary. (Carol is startled at Mr. Hadid’s familiarity with the word “soufflé.”) With one another of course they’re entirely at ease, and so traditional modes of dysfunction are much in evidence.

Guzzling martinis, Cash lobs snarky asides at his brother and ridicules his own girlfriend, whom he casually calls a nitwit. Clay dredges up dusty grievances about the boys’ mildly abusive father. Kelly, an uptight lawyer, rails against President Bush and his supporters, those repellent T.G.I. Friday’s customers and T.J.Maxx shoppers so unfortunately unavoidable on airplanes. (Her words, by the way; I love those potato skins.)

Carol clucks sympathetically and natters on about the mind-expanding benefits of public television. “That’s the thing about PBS, I always think, how it gives you a broader perspective on the different cultures,” she says. “You know, Clay has the cleaning lady that always wears the scarf on her head? And I said to her, ‘Your scarf is so pretty, did you bring that from your country?’ ”

Mr. Norris is also an actor, and writes tangy, literate dialogue that gives his actors ample scope to shine. Ms. Houdyshell serves up a cluelessly hypocritical variation on the warm maternal figure she played so memorably in Lisa Kron’s “Well” last season. Mr. Rogers is also ideally cast as the smirking misanthrope, and the wonderful Ms. Cash perfectly captures both the naïve sweetness and the moral deafness of her abused character, who, along with the silent Kayla, is the only member of this clan to lay some claim to our sympathy.

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Aya Cash and Reg Rogers in Bruce Norriss Pain and the Itch.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Directed at a brisk clip by Anna D. Shapiro, who staged the play’s premiere at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, “The Pain and the Itch” is the first of Mr. Norris’s several plays for the Steppenwolf to be seen in New York. Carefully plotted (overplotted, actually) and marked by a savage comic flair, it is nevertheless seriously marred by overstatement, a familiar flaw in the work of writers still finding their aesthetic footing.

Mr. Norris’s harshly satiric view of his characters doesn’t quite jibe with the play’s naturalistic format. The bad behavior on view here verges on the absurd, but the play never takes off into the surrealistic realms colonized by Christopher Durang, for instance. The unpleasantness is strictly earthbound, unzany and ultimately wearisome.

As the carping and the recriminations flow on and on, you may find yourself possessed by a painful itch to fling yourself onstage and begin knocking heads together, or at least to take one of Clay’s golf clubs to the flat-screen TV.

And Mr. Norris’s hyperbolic view of his characters’ iniquity is fueled a little too obviously by moralism. His aim is to expose and condemn the shallow nature of the liberal views espoused by members of the urban bourgeoisie, people who “feel bad because what they practice doesn’t square with what they preach,” as Cash puts it. “Which makes them feel every bit as bad as the materialistic barbarians they despise!” But the practices in “The Pain and the Itch” are too unrelievedly repellent to be mistaken for the real behavior of real people, so Mr. Norris’s diagnosis is likely to fall on deaf ears.